Uh, so here we are in 2012 and Santa was kind enough to land a copy of Skyrim on my desk and now I’m quietly watching all my delivery deadlines sail off into the wild blue yonder. Or white and snowy yonder, as the case may be. Ah well.

So what’s up for this year:

February 7th: The Order of the Scales comes out in the US and (I think) in France. The dragons made it to a couple of best-of lists again this year – over at the Ranting Dragon and an honourable mention at the bottom of the Wertzone Awards. You read these two pages, you realise what a lot of great fantasy we had last year.

April: The Warlock’s Shadow comes out in small form. I feel kind of sorry for the thief-taker and his boy – they haven’t taken off quite like the dragons did, but I love them just the same. The third book, The King’s Assassin,has been delivered but there won’t be any more in this series, not directly. However, as the Enormous Crocodile would say, I have secret plans and clever tricks…

May: Not sure of the dates, exactly, but The Black Mausoleum comes out around this time and I’m supposed to be delivering Dragon Queen. Dragon Queen is is going to be a bit different. And a bit bigger. Most of it is set in the world of the Taiytakei, but currently there are parts set in the dragon-realms, a part in Deepwater and some parts in Tethis, the centre of the action in The King’s Assassin. I say currently because it’s still in work, but Skyrim or otherwise, I shall make it my resolutino this year to deliver this one on time. Much more character-focussed than the first three books, this one. I hope.

Summer: Allegedly, all three volumes of the Memory of Flames come out in Germany, one each month. More news on that when I actually know.

The project-about-which-I-shall-not-speak is also supposed to be delivered. That’s more of a self-imposed deadline than anything else. More, er… Skyrim prone, that one. Three Sodium Hydride manuscripts before the summer holidays and I’ll be happy.

It’s also possible that The King’s Assassin will come out in August. Or maybe October. It’s delivered, that’s all I can say for sure so far.

Something might happen in Poland at some point. Chances are I’ll heart about it long after the event. In fact, all sorts of things might happen in the last third of the year. I’m hoping for some rather more exciting (for me at least) news for the back end of the year, but it’s an unceratin world and an uncertain profession, this authoring lark. Appearances at conventions and so forth might be a bit thin on the ground this year due to circumstances beyond my control (and not Skyrim, really really) but I’ll do as much as I can.

Anyway, happy new year, and I raise a glass to all you dragon-lovers! Cheers!

There’s Karatos, the alchemist sentenced to death for being what she is. There’s Siff in the next cell. His death sentence is for killing four soldiers with his bare hands even though he has no memory of how he did it. There’s Skjorl, the Adamantine Man whose job it is to watch over them.

Thing is, though, Siff knows something. He knows something that might just change the fate of the world and right now, any change at all is looking like a good thing. So Kataros has to get him out, so he can show her what he’s found, and never mind that he’s likely going to stab her in the back the first chance he gets. To get him out, she needs Skjorl, even if the Adamantine Man would rather stab himself than help someone like Siff, and that’s only the start of what he’d do to her, given the chance.

And then there’s the dragon. The dragon doesn’t hate any of them. It’s a dragon. It simply wants to eat them.

The Black Mausoleum. Someone’s going to die.

Submitted this week.

The Warlock’s Shadow has been submitted! Hurrah!

King of the Crags hit the Ranting Dragon’s best of 2010 list! Hurrah!

Now what?

Another year, and things are gonna change around here. At some point, the graphics of my site are all going to change. It’s time, I’m told, to get a bit more dragony. So expect to see some of this…

OK, it’s not the final cover, which won’t have the quote from Joe on it. But I’m an impatient man and bored of waiting for the final cover art (pokes editor gently with a stick. But only gently because I’ve just missed a deadline…)

WHAT? MISSED A DEADLINE? WHAT KIND OF AUTHOR DOES THAT?

A very shame-faced one in this case, because it’s all my own fault. All I can say to anyone else out there who might one day find themselves in the same position is DON’T assume the manuscript you wrote six months ago is ‘fine and just needs a bit of touching up’ and leave looking at it again until a month before it’s due for submission.

The good(ish) news is that The Warlock’s Shadow will only be about two weeks late on my editor’s desk, at which point I can go back to poking him with a large stick instead. About things like THE FINISHED COVER ART FOR ORDER OF THE SCALES,DAMMIT! (although actually, we should all feel a little sorry for the man, as he’s had to pick up a load of extra authors on top of the too much work he already had, and I dare say a lot of them are every bit as annoying as I am).

In more dragony news, the rewrites for Order of the Scales are going fine and the first complete draft for The Black Mausoleum is now sitting on my laptop. Hmmm. Won’t put off those rewrites quite as long with this one.

There are some other changes coming for 2011. I’m thinking of some slightly different content. I’ll try not to be boring, but, tempting as it is to go into detail as to whether the VAT is or isn’t a regressive tax, frankly I’m not that interested, and I suspect that goes the same for most of the people who actually read this. And it would be a huge piece of work. And then we’d get into arguments that would drag on for ages, and I’ll disagree with you about stuff you believe in passionately because the foundations of almost every argument made either way are built on the sand of dodgy statistics, and if there’s one thing that really gets my goat, it’s dodgy statistics… There, see, ranting already!

<Runs off. Has cold shower. Comes back>

No. Expect the occasional post about Star Wars, gaming, and how five-year-old children absolutely understand Munchkin in a way it takes a mature adult years to learn.

Finally, 2010 ended with a couple of rather nice reviews for King of the Crags, anticipating (perhaps) its forthcoming US release.

“Stephen Deas has combined all that’s good in fantasy and spun it around in a thriller-paced tale that will leave you breathless.” The Ranting Dragon.

“Prince Jehal … is brilliant. One of the most complex, twisted and ultimately human characters I’ve read … When I think back over what I’ve read this year … I’m hard pressed to find one I enjoyed more than this one.” SF Crowsnest

Happy New Year!

I have an emergency editor. I know several writers who have them these days, or else beta-readers or someone who’s going to give them a second opinion on their work before they submit it to their publisher. I have no idea whether we’re a small minority or a vast majority, or whether such things are far more common now than they used to be. I’d say I don’t really care either, but if some knew the answer, I’d be curious enough to listen. Point being, really, we all have our own way of doing things; for me, every now and then, that means wheeling out the emergency editor whenever something just isn’t working.

Roughly, the way it works is that I read the manuscript, chapter by chapter, and get stopped every seventeen-and-a-half seconds to be told that I’ve now used the word effervescent twice in living memory and why is one of my characters explicitly walking slowly in one sentence and then observed to be moving quickly in the next (fortunately allowing me to simply skip the next sentence in which they dismount from the horse they never actually had in the first place). Often there is a little coda, along the lines of ‘that chapter’s quite good’ or ‘that was a bit long’ or the dreaded ‘Meh. OK I guess,’ which means it isn’t.

As you can imagine, sometimes this can mean that reading through a chapter, even one of mine, can take quite a long time. I’d been mentally thinking of it as extreme editing, since we really do pick apart the manuscript line by line sometimes. However, I understand from several of my fellow authors that extreme editing is already taken and refers to re-writes carried out while free-climbing the Tsaranoro Massif or hiding inside a cave somewhere on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. My version takes place curled up somewhere warm and cosy and usually involves either hot chocolate or hot and sour soup. Not all that extreme really.

Admittedly, what comes to mind when I think ‘emergency editor’ is the emergency pilot from Airplane! but that just. . . No, just let’s not go there.

So next time you put down a book and revel in the buzz of just how good it was, spare a thought for the beta-readers, the emergency editors, the unpaid (I’d say unsung, but I guess they’re often among the names credited in the this-novel-would-never-have-existed-if-it-wasn’t-for bit that I never used to read up to a few years ago (please tell me I’m the only one) helpers who do it for the love. And the chocolate. And the soups. And maybe an episode of Dexter every 2-3 chapters, but still, mostly for the love.

(You can follow my muse, my better half, my emergency editor and many other things, the gorgeous and heroic @adamantine_lady, on Twitter. Just, for the love of Planck’s Constant, don’t say anything bad about Name of the Wind. Meanwhile The Warlock’s Shadow has been moved out of theatre and into intensive care).

At the time of writing, I have four novels all at various stages of completion.

The Order of the Scales is with my editor for editing. Eventually it will come back. Some form of rewrite will occur. Then there will be copy-editing, another (minor) rewrite and then the proof-reading (during which I probably won’t change the ending this time).

The Warlock’s Shadow is probably one spit-and-polish rewrite away from being ready to be sent to my editor.

The King’s Assassin exists as a complete first draft. It’s a bit rubbish at the moment, needs at least one major rewrite, but it’s recognisable as a complete story and largely the one that will appear in print one day.

The first draft of The Black Mausoleum is, er…. started.

Now all of that’s probably not very interesting unless you’re my editor, but I think I’ve declared that I’ve ‘finished’ at least two of them at some point in the past. Which might have made sense in the context in which it was said, but does make me wonder what an author actually means when he or she says something is finished.

Is it when the first draft is complete? All the creative hard work is done, after all, and the rewrites are just touching up, right? Well I used to think that, but no, sometimes rewrites involve taking large chunks, throwing them away and replacing them with new large chunks. So no, first draft is NOT finished. Kind of obvious when you stop to think about it.

Maybe a more generally accepted ‘finished’ is when something is submission-ready; when an author genuinely thinks they’ve finished and have something that’s ready to go to print. No author would submit if they didn’t think that, right? Right? I mean, we wouldn’t do it just because it was ‘well, mostly done anyway’ and we were aching for that next advance cheque, right? And editors don’t generally change much, do they? Do they? They don’t for example, take your 200,000 word manuscript and advise you to throw away 185,000 words of it and build a new novel around the remainder? They wouldn’t do that, would they?

Yes, they would. In fact they delight in it. If something was always ‘finished’ when it was submitted, editors would be a bit pointless. If we can’t say we’re finished until we’ve satisfied our editor, you might as well throw in the copy-edit as well. Changes here are supposed to be more about the structure of sentences and paragraphs than about scenes or entire acts, but that’s not to say it can’t happen. You can throw in the proof-reading too.

Even once a book is in print, typos still get found and corrected for subsequent editions. If you’re strict with your definitions, maybe a book is finished when it’s permanently out of print. Although maybe by then it’s almost finished in a different way.

In order to eradicate such confusion, I propose the following taxonomy of ‘finished’s

Done: I have written a first draft that seems fine right now, but will bear little resemblance to the final published story.

Sorted: I have written the second draft that apparently needs just a little spit and polish to be complete, but will still bear little resemblance to the final published story.

Poobah-poobah<unnecessary scene>: I truly and utterly believe I have completed the finest work of fiction ever beheld. Every word is a polished jewel of inspiration. I am merely giving this to my editor so I might revel in his gasps of admiration and delight. I am a Hephaestus among word-smiths, whose creative genious will evolve my readers to higher planes of thought.

Finnished: I have taken my editors many and oft sarcastic comments in my stride. I have also taken both the appropriate calming medicines and the necessary remedial action. Although I will never publicly admit this, it’s probably better than it was.

Really Finnished: I have finished the copy-edit and it is perfect. Now leave me alone.

Finished: I have done the damn proof-reading and removed the fucking typos. I never want to see this book again.

So, for future reference, and just so we all know what we’re talking about, The King’s Assassin is Done, the Warlock’s Shadow is Sorted, and Order of the Scales is Poobah-poobah<unnecessary scene>. There. Isn’t it all much clearer now?

I have become a single dad, and a rather unwell one at that, for the week, so this will be short. Gemmells: Hurrah for dragons and congratulations through gritted teeth to Pierre Peveral and The Cardinal’s Blades for kicking my Adamantine butt in the Morningstar award. Also noted that the Empire, winner of the main Legend award probably took a lot of people by surprise, but was probably the most Gemmell-esque novel on the shortlist. So, justice. Also, for those of you who weren’t there, you missed the opportunity to get the ENTIRE GOLLANCZ OUTPUT for 2010 for a little over £200 in the auction.

Order of the Scales went to my editor late last week, this week is proof-reading The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice.

Also, am watching with amusement as the old football powers of Europe struggle their way through the group stages of the World Cup and start to crash out. It seems to me that we all expect England, France, Germany and Italy to dominate their groups and when they don’t we mutter at how bad they were with perhaps not enough regard for the ‘lesser’ nations that keep thwarting their progress. Serbia, New Zealand, Algeria and South Africa might not have the same talent available, but that’s clearly not the end of the story and often their passion and desire have made them a joy to watch. Makes me wonder whether the same can be said of genre fiction writers. Are we all trying to be George RR Martin? No, we’re doing our own thing. We’re playing the same game, that’s all.

Blah blah. I can haz sleep now?

As I write this, there are two ARCs of The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice available up on eBay. One of them is signed, the other is unsigned. The difference in price is considerable. My thoughts on this are conflicted. Along the lines of:

Wow. That’s a lot of money for a book.

So my signature is worth that much? Coo.

To someone else.

Which bit of NOT FOR RESALE isn’t clear?

The book isn’t out for NEARLY THREE MONTHS yet.

OI!

I’ve signed exactly two ARCs of The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice. Signed them at Forbidden Planet. I’m really quite sure I haven’t signed any others, and, well, the fact that it’s got a date on it kind of dots the i’s and crosses the t’s quite nicely. So, Britobooks, now I know who you are. The question is, do I mind?

On one level yes, simply because ARCs state that they are NOT FOR RESALE and so selling them on e-bay is riding roughshod over the wishes of the publisher, who presumably supplied said ARC free and gratis and entirely at their own expense. And my publisher is my friend and if you upset my publicist, you upset me in a big sticking together all-on-the-same-team group-hugging kind of way.

But should I care? Exactly how does an author, lose out? So what if it’s on sale on eBay? Seriously, is there anyone so desperate to read The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice that they’re prepared to pay five times the recommended retail price just to get it three months early? No. So it’s going to go to a collector who’s only interested in it because it’s an expensive and a rarity. In fact, signing the ARC is a marginal win for me, isn’t it, since it pushes the price up and ensures that the book isn’t bought by a casual reader who might otherwise have bought a copy from a shop. Since that ARC would otherwise presumably have languished in a box and might now be read, leading to the (unlikely, perhaps, but still extant) possibility of enthusiasm, further book purchases, reviews, etc., strictly I think I should be pleased it’s on e-bay instead of in a box.

Well I’m not. Publication day is three months away, the ARC is in ‘fine unread condition’ (one therefore assumes no review will be forthcoming[2]). Britobooks, you have cost me nothing, but  your don’t-give-a-shit attitude is rude and makes my publicist sad. I wave my private parts at you, fart in your general direction and speak your name to my friends in Her Majesties Revenue and Customs. However…

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that Britobooks, whoever he/she is, had in fact read the ARC and had reviewed it (and is simply waiting, as asked, for a few days before publication before releasing their review into the wild) and had waited until after publication day[3]. The ARC has served its purpose and a surfeit of ARCs, after all, is a problem… So if it’s sold on e-bay, who exactly loses? If an ARC is read, reviewed and then sold after the first edition is in the shops, frankly why should either author or publisher care? [1]

(Progress report: Working on the last rewrite of OOTS. Can’t decide if it’s a disordered mess or the best thing I’ve ever written. Possibly both. Aiming to submit to my publisher around about the day of the Gemmells).

[1] My personal preference would be for spent ARCS to find their way to charity shops and be read several times more rather than languish on the shelves of a collector, but hey, you take the trouble to write a review, I’m not going to complain.

[2] Also, from a quick stock check of other signed proofs in their store, I can also reveal that I’m worth about a quarter of an Abercrombie. I find I can live with that.

[3] Late edit: It’s been pointed out to me that early release of ARCs into the wild like this then leads to the possibility of pre-release torrenting of the book, and that surely does hurt both author and publisher.

Gemmel awards last reminder: You vote for the Morning Star award here, the Legend award here and the Ravenheart (cover art) award here. Inside information is that the Ravenheart award in particular needs your love, and given the passion of debate about cover art I’ve seen here and there over the last months, that’s a bit of a surprise. Vote, if you haven’t, and if you have, make ten other people do it. And then make each of them make ten more people vote. Build your own block-voting pyramid scheme! Anything, as long as it’s not apathy. Apathy would be bad. This round of voting is just for the shortlists, after all. A month from now, I shall be bothering you all about this again.

Today’s news is that the final printed copies of King of the Crags have arrived, and very fine they look too:

Shiny shiny, shiny books of dragons...

Nice sample on the back of the hardcover, too: He’d tried to hide deep amid the darkness, beneath layer upon layer of leaf-shadow and branches, but they always found him. He’d tried to run, but the fire always followed him and the forest turned to flames and ash behind him. He’d tried the freezing waters of the river and the dragons had simply boiled it dry… (from chapter one).

On Order of the Scales, I spent the last few days rearranging the chapters in the first third until my eyes bled, trying to get the pacing right. But that’s done, and once I can see again, I’ll be about halfway through by the end of the week. I’m very close to a draft that’s ready to submit with this one.

Oh, and at the Gollancz quiz night last night, I think I got at least one question right, and we all left hot with the buzz about the latest offering from Adam Roberts, who largely stole the show with his plug for Yellow Blue Tibia III, Yellowest, bluest, most-tibia-like-thing. Or something like that. Am already looking forward to any news on part IV, Yellow Blue Tibia with A Vengeance.

I may also finally be living my childhood dreams. Or I may not. For now, this is as uncertain as Adam’s aliens.

In theory I’m supposed to be taking a couple of weeks off between completing the proof-reading of King of the Crags and launching into the last rewrite of The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice and then the very-far-from-last rewrite of Order of the Scales. So I absolutely haven’t started working on something else and it absolutely isn’t called The Black Mausoleum and there absolutely aren’t 10000-odd words of this already laid down. Absolutely can’t have happened. It’s my fortnight off, after all.

In the meantime, as the UK celebrates(?) its biggest ever lottery win, I note that this would equate to selling roughly 100 million books. I’m estimating a roughly 50/50 chance of achieving this before the sun explodes [1].

For those of you looking for anything more substantial, I have left a mess over on John Scalzi’s blog, in which I fantasize  that there might be some sort of element of vicarious satisfaction or even satire involved in writing stories about enormous fire-breathing monsters burning the shit out of people who badly badly deserve it.

Oh, wait, that doesn’t happen until later…

[1]  All right all right, swells up into a red giant and vapourizing everything, strictly isn’t the same as exploding.